Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine

Capitalism and Freedom

Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, may have been the first modern-day Tea Partyer. In Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1962, Friedman makes his most important contribution to his profession: the argument that the best medicine for curing a recession and stabilizing economies is for a nation’s central bank (the Federal Reserve for the U.S.) to be slowly but constantly increasing the amount banks are allowed to lend and therefore increasing the supply of money — but only in brief. Instead of economic proofs, Friedman spends much of the book urging government restraint; he starts off by condemning John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you” inaugural address, saying it reduces the individual to a serf with the government as his master. Friedman always thought it should be the other way around.